for every line you've not crossed
by one.twilight.sun
Summary: The language of barriers is something Dana Scully understands.


**Author's Note:** First _X-Files_ fanfic! It's been a long time coming. I just spent the past two months watching Seasons 1 – 8 of this epic series and have fallen in love with Mulder and Scully all over again. There's just a level of understanding that I didn't have when I was 10 years old. (I'm currently ignoring Season 9 because 8 just ended on such a wonderful note.) I'd appreciate feedback on this first time endeavor—I've also been out of the running for so long as a writer, I felt creaky writing this.

**for every line you've not crossed**

_Lines_.

_Boundaries_.

_Barriers_.

These are the words that she understands. These are things that she's learned to keep in place. She's drawn a circle of protection around herself throughout the ever changing homes and neighborhoods, the harsh and strict discipline from Catholic nuns and in the male-dominated career she forges ahead in.

She's been alone by choice.

Analytically, she can look at how closed off she became and remembers the tears she shed as a small child when she had to leave the place she'd just learned to call home. Or the stern face of her father after a day in school where the back of her hands are covered with red marks. She recalls the smirks of the young and cocky men as she strode through the Hoover halls in her ill-fitting suit and clunky heels. Analyzing this, her history, she knows that this isolation has been in the name of protection and was something she'd reconciled herself to.

Then she met him.

At first glance, it looked like he didn't understand the same sacred boundaries as she did or, at least, didn't care to respect the meaning of them. He wasn't proper. He was rude and arrogant. He crowded her personal space and touched her in a somewhat propriety manner.

From the moment he'd shaken her hand in that dim basement office, the lines she'd carefully drawn and nurtured over the years, had smudged. Just a little but it was enough.

She hadn't seen then that it was the same for him. Mulder, who didn't seem to care about the opinions of others in the Bureau, who flouted authority without a second thought and who went haring off at the drop of a hat in the name of the Great Truth, he'd felt that same blurring. He had his own lines and boundaries he'd drawn long ago to deal with the silence of his home in the wake of his sister's abduction and the struggle for answers in the shadows of their world.

They'd spent years together, investigating the paranormal, the bad and the ugly. They had so many nights on the road, in and out of one cheap motel after another. They'd survived through near death experiences, attempted murders and terminal illnesses. Day after day, those walls crumbled between them and a connection was fused that could not be denied. Yet, to a degree, remained unacknowledged. Just as they both had their boundaries, so too did they have the inability to put the crossing of lines in vocal form.

Two people so different yet so alike, she muses. Were they fated to meet? She dislikes the thought yet can't fight off the sense of rightness that tails it. It's something she's contemplated before, on that night where the last physical barrier dropped. When they acknowledged their connection, their love, still without uttering the words to define it.

She doesn't know why he hesitates, but she's sees why she does. If she says the words, if she reveals what lies close to her heart, that last line, that very last barrier, will be erased, and she will be left open to him. And to all the world.

But she's also starting to wonder if this inability to speak the truth is the right thing.

Her gaze takes in the scene before her. His dark head is bent over the pale one of his son, his hooded eyes and eidetic memory taking in each piece of their undeniable mutual creation that rips through whatever walls they've tried to keep up. The child is sleeping, comfortable and safe in the arms of his father.

The smile she can no longer withhold lights her face softly as she turns a little to take in the rest of the room which shows further evidence of the mixing of two lives. His paperback is turned facedown on the side of the bed that she sees now is "his." His leather jacket is thrown over the small settee at the end of the bed. The tips of his shoes are sticking out from under the bed covers and she knows that if she were to open the chest of drawers or open her closet, she would see his clothes mixed in with hers.

A small chuckle escapes her. The lines have blurred and smudged without her really being aware of it. Her amusement catches his attention and his eyes meet hers, crinkling slightly at the edges as his own smile emerges. She simply looks at him, in this moment of quiet epiphany.

Words have never been necessary.

She approaches where he sits on the edge of the bed, rocking their son quietly. He doesn't take his eyes off her as she fits herself between his legs and places her hands on either side of his face. A gesture echoing one made years ago in the moment etched in their minds.

"I love you." The three syllables never to have crossed her lips to him before are met by a silence that stretches while the words find their niches in the space between them. She watches patiently as it sinks in and he slowly blinks, hazel momentarily shuttered but then laid open before her.

He's waited to hear her say these words, even while he's weighed the truth of them in his mind and heart and now with the heavy evidence in his hands, but to have Scully say it, he appreciates this final step to disintegrating whatever they've held between them.

He responds the only way he can, "Thank you."

Her thumbs caress his lips, just as that long ago moment in his hallway, except this time, she completes the thought that had been in their minds and brings her lips to meet his.


End file.
